Up From Orchard Street by Eleanor Widmer Page B

Europe.
    One Sunday every month Yussie came to see his mother in the role of the dutiful son and to expand his chest as he flashed his engraved business cards: James Feld, Fruit Fit for Royalty. Even his West Fifty-seventh Street address was catchy.
    Yussie had married Martha, a girl from the Bronx, a high school graduate who had hoped to attend Hunter College before he swept her off her tiny feet. Yussie towered over her. He and his wife were perfectly matched, she docile, adoring, proud of James. But one glimpse of their daughter, Shirley, revealed that she didn’t dine on her father’s fancy fruit.
    She wasn’t pleasingly plump, just fat. Her fancy outfits couldn’t disguise the short chunky legs, the round stomach, the moon face. Shirley Feld’s permanent wave produced curls in the manner of Shirley Temple. The fourteen-karat gold bracelet on her wrist bit into her flesh, and the two gold rings on her left hand were buried in puffy skin.
    Yussie paid the street urchins to watch his car during the hour he spent chatting with his mother on Orchard Street, yet he wouldn’t part with a cent for his favorite meal, which Bubby invariably prepared for him—an entire duck with orange sauce, which he called “duck à l’orange.” To display his generosity, he always brought Bubby three navel oranges for the sauce and every now and then a one-serving pocket-sized jar of commercial jelly, surely a joke. Bubby’s preserves, put up in gallon jars, were famous.
    But Bubby laughed rather than complain. Remembering Yussie from his early days, she didn’t take his pomposity seriously.
    Yussie ate Bubby’s food in his mother’s kitchen, but after a while the family would troop downstairs to our apartment and Shirley Feld, in a red velvet dress in winter and a red flowery one with ruffles in summer, honored us with a recitation. She took elocution lessons, a word that burned itself into my heart. Each and every time she recited the same piece. Since my parents worked on Division Street on Sundays, always a busy day, they would arrive home exhausted and the last thing they wanted was to array themselves in chairs on the Persian rug and listen to Shirley Feld. But after much stumbling and pausing, gazing down at her Mary Jane pumps, and then upward at our ceiling, Shirley managed to get through the same few lines:
    When I was a beggarly boy

I lived in a cellar damp.

I had not a friend nor a toy

But I had Aladdin’s lamp.
    When I could not sleep for the cold

I had fire enough in my brain

And builded with roofs of gold

My beautiful castles in Spain.
    My parents and my grandmother applauded dutifully. Mrs. Feldman and Yussie’s wife, Martha, beamed.
    But on the Sunday that Shirley Feld recited wearing a white rabbit muff on her right hand, I could bear it no longer and ran into my parents’ bedroom. Shirley scarcely noticed because after the recitation she was busy polishing off an entire plate of butter cookies sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar. As they got ready to leave, Yussie left his card with us for the hundredth time and Martha dramatically shook out Shirley’s winter coat with its gray Persian lamb collar and cuffs.
    “What a four-flusher,” I heard my father say with distaste. “I wonder if he ever told his fancy wife with her fancy mink that he once stayed out of town for three years.”
    “Shah,” my grandmother replied. “It doesn’t pay to talk like that.”
    “But he’s such a phony.”
    Bubby paused before replying. “Yussie has something to be phony about. He used to hitch rides on the back of trucks, the biggest goniff on the streets. So, if he wants to show off, you should laugh at him.”
    Then she rushed into the bedroom to find out why I was crying.
    My mother hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t in the dining room. Standing on her high heels from ten in the morning until seven at night, Lil worked on commission only, with no base pay. On Sundays, when the store was particularly crowded, she